We are what we eat

We may have that leverage, but McDonald's still has that unmistakable taste, which you aptly describe as "a fragrance and flavor only nominally connected to hamburgers or French fries." It's a flavor that, once tried, you tend to crave. I expect a part of me, anyway, will always be attached to the flavor of a McDonald's cheeseburger.

Yeah, you probably grew up on it -- that salty, meaty, hard-to-describe taste that is not really the product of any cow or chicken but of food science. It's a part of our culture now and it's not going to go away. But, I wonder whether or not you can turn that craving back with good food. I've seen many children who lost their taste for fast food after being exposed to really good food. A grass-fed hamburger, for instance, takes some getting used to but it's such a wonderful taste. I know I'm ruined for a fast food hamburger now. But that's partly because I know too much. Food is not simply a matter of taste bud to brain. There are memories involved and they can play both ways. You may have the memory of your childhood Big Mac, but I have the memory of a slaughterhouse. Junk food does have the advantage of being designed to push our buttons. We're hard-wired to take in as much sweet and fat as we can get when it's available because, for most of human history, we never knew if it would be around tomorrow. But now it will be around tomorrow. So there's a disconnect between our genetic inheritance and our food environment. And fast food companies are good at manipulating that, at designing flavors that will seduce us. But nature's been designing flavors to seduce us for 10,000 years or more, so I still think they're a pretty good match.

But this line between "artificial" and "natural" has become increasingly difficult to locate, as evidenced by the rise of what you call "big organic" or "industrial organic." What do those terms mean?

I use them as a way to describe how the scaling up of organic agriculture has led to a diminishment of the core principles of the movement. Now you have 5,000 cow organic dairies that are organic only in the narrow sense that the cows are eating organic grain. It's probably less important to a cow that its feed be organic than that its food be what it was evolved to eat, which is grass. There's a perversion in taking an animal off the food that it's evolved to eat and feeding it organic grain just because some consumer thinks pesticide is the worst thing in the world. And as organic farms get bigger, there's a push toward monoculture because large buyers would rather get all their corn from one farm. If you're making organic corn chips, you don't want to be writing 50 contracts with 50 small farms, you want one honking big organic corn farm. You see it with Whole Foods. Farmers used to be able to go to the back door of Whole Foods in California after they were done at the farmers market and sell whatever was left over. But as Whole Foods grew, it went to this regional distribution system and now most of their produce comes from two companies. Still, the fact is that even that big organic corn farm is better for the environment and better for the eater than a conventional one. The idea is not to condemn Whole Foods or the organic movement but to hold them to a higher bar.

Which leads us to the genre you call "supermarket pastoral." What is it exactly?

Walking through Whole Foods, I joke in the book, is a literary experience. You need to be a pretty good literary critic, in other words, to figure out what's really being said on these labels. They're written in what I call supermarket pastoral, which is a very persuasive form. I read a lot of labels and I'm still a sucker for it. Free-range chicken, for instance, can mean nothing more than a 20,000-bird shed with a tiny little lawn and a little door that's opened two weeks before the hens are slaughtered. These little yards are purely symbolic. Chickens don't use them because they're too careful. They've never been outside before; there's not enough room for all of them and they're a flock animal. So it's a conceit to appeal to the consumer. When you see "free-range," it's not happening, but if you see "pastured" chicken, which you sometimes will at a farmers market, that's real. And pastured eggs, by the way, are a superior product in every way. I know a farmer in California who grows them. They're $6 a dozen and I consider them worth it.

So is pastured the new organic?

It's certainly an important thing to look for as a consumer. But again, when you see "range-fed" beef that also doesn't mean anything, because all beef is range fed until the animal is 6 months to a year old. You can't put them on the feedlot right after they're born because the corn will kill them. So you shouldn't be fooled. What you're really looking for is grass-finished, which can still be hard to find, but is becoming much more common. For my money, grass is nature's great free lunch. When you eat animals at the end of a grass-based food chain, you're eating food that comes from the sun and not from fossil fuel.

But are any of these alternative food chains up to the task of feeding large cities?

Well, I think it's a challenge. People in cities are probably always going to have to access larger markets. The definition of their food shed is going to be larger, but cities offer advantages as well. The farmers markets in our big cities are more vital than those in our small towns because there's so much buying power. Agriculture around the San Francisco Bay area is thriving precisely because you have a large and discerning population not too far from farms so farmers can get a really high premium on their food. In a way, the solution to the Iowa problem is to have a bigger city in the middle of Iowa. But it's really important and increasingly difficult to protect the greenbelts around cities. The best way is to patronize those farms, but no matter how much local food you buy, the temptation for farmers to sell their land is often tremendous. Farmers are going out of business not because they can't survive on their sales, but because their land is so valuable they decide to sell it and retire on the income. I read one projection that by the end of this century, there won't be any farms left in California's Central Valley. I don't feel so good about that. However you feel about free trade with regard to your computer or your car, my guess is that, if you thought about it, you'd feel differently about your food. A situation where America no longer produces its own food is not only disturbing at a visceral level, but a national security crisis waiting to happen.

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